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How to rescue your pictures from Flickr

At some point, I realized the only copy of some photos I have are on Flickr, the popular photo blogging service owned by Yahoo. That made me nervous for two reasons: Flickr is a single point of failure, and Yahoo has problems including massive user ID and password security breaches. So I decided to back up my Flickr library to my Mac. I took what I learned and put it in a new blog post over at Backblaze. I’ve outlined three ways that you can download your pics quickly.

I’ve been using Flickr for nigh on 13 years now – since before Yahoo bought it in 2005, I know that much – so I have a lot of photos there. Over 8,000, in fact. Many of the earlier ones I don’t have on my Mac or my iPhone.

Now, I know better, I do. But it’s been almost a decade and a half, and in the intervening years I’ve bought hard drives which have died and migrated data to more than half a dozen new computers, so I guess it shouldn’t be a total surprise that I have stuff on Flickr I don’t have anywhere else. Makes me wonder what else I’ve lost over the years, frankly.

The first method to back up your Flickr photos is built right into Flickr. Flickr has a download tool that enables you to select individual photos or galleries for download to a handy ZIP file. It works, but it’s kludgy if you want to back up your entire library, as I did.

I also tested out two free-to-download third-party backup tools. The first is Bulkr, an Adobe AIR-dependent app that is available in “Pro” trim for $29. The second is Flickr Downloadr, which doesn’t cost a cent but is, quite frankly, a bit kludgy in the UI department. Still, they both work.